Re: Pivotal loop moments, or, when did you realize yourcompulsive need to aquire toys had reached dangerous levels?

[David Myers <dmgraph@bway.net>]

>Anybody want to share a few moments that made them realize that they had
>no alternative other than to become a loopster?  Or shining moments?
>
>I can't figure out when I started.  I can say that I had the realization
>that I was a loopster when I was reading a description of this
>newfangled product called the JamMan.  Reading that ad made me think,
>haven't I been doing sort of a halfassed version of this for a while
>now, and realized I had better go for at least another quarter of an
>ass.  I put off the purchase of this box for a very long time, untill I
>struck up a conversation with a young lad who had an echoplex, and said
>he'd heard about some wacky mailing list...
>
>Somewhere after the beginning and before the end of the aforementioned
>saga, I remember seeing Yo La Tengo, and watching Ira Kaplan split his
>signal with an ABY box, sending a loop of an Emaj chord into a battered
>Fender Deluxe, with the tremelo set on stun, and noodling over it using
>another amp.  That moment, as much as anything, cemented my resolve to
>get one of those there boxes.
>
>Trevor

Actually, I think that for me the fascination with the loop goes back
before I even began doing music.  It's about time itself somehow.  I must
have seen George Pal's film of "The Time Machine" a dozen times, and have
always been riveted by any sort of time-related book or film.  I was a
novice guitarist (still am) about 1966 when I ran into an Echoplex, and it
destroyed me--they practically had to drag me out of the store.  To me, it
didn't matter what you put INTO the thing, it was what the thing did--store
a chunk of time, let you mess with that.  It still blows my mind.  Perhaps
this is why most of what I've done doesn't use any instruments, just delays
and loops singing their own songs....

David Myers
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"Eternity is not limited by the conditions of time, and time is eternal in
virtue of its cyclic recurrence."
-Hermetica, Asclepius III